Architecture and Public Policy

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CIS explores how changes in the architecture of computer networks affect the economic environment for innovation and competition on the Internet, and how the law should react to those changes. This work has lead us to analyze the issue of network neutrality, perhaps the Internet's most debated policy issue, which concerns Internet user's ability to access the content and software of their choice without interference from network providers.

Daphne Keller is the Director of Intermediary Liability at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society. She was previously Associate General Counsel for Intermediary Liability and Free Speech issues at Google. In that role she focused primarily on legal and policy issues outside the U.S., including the E.U.’s evolving “Right to Be Forgotten.” Her earlier roles at Google included leading the core legal teams for Web Search, Copyright, and Open Source Sof

David S. Levine is an Associate Professor of Law at Elon University School of Law and an Affiliate Scholar at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School (CIS). He is also the founder and host of Hearsay Culture on KZSU-FM (Stanford University), an information policy, intellectual property law and technology talk show for which he has recorded over 190 interviews since May 2006. Hearsay Culture was named as a top five podcast in the ABA's Blawg 100 of 2008 and can be found at http://hearsayculture.com.

Thomas Lohninger is a digital rights advocate in Europe mainly focused on net neutrality and surveillance. Together with the SaveTheInternet.eu campaign he coordinated the civil society efforts to push pro net neutrality safeguards within the european telecom single market regulation. He is an expert in the field of net neutrality and worked as Policy Analyst for European Digital Rights.

Andrew McLaughlin is a technology law and policy nerd. He is Executive Director of Civic Commons, a new non-profit that help cities and other governments share and implement low-cost technologies to improve public services, management, accountability, transparency, and citizen engagement. He is also a director of Code for America.

Per today's ruling, injunctions against European ISPs requiring them to apply filtering tools that monitor traffic to prevent copyright infringement officially violate EU law. The Scarlet decision puts a major stick in the wheel of wholesale copyright holders fighting against file sharing activities. With the expected implementation of the ACTA in mind, this ruling by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) will likely affect both prospective copyright legislation in Europe and offensive strategies of rights holders in their operations against intermediaries.

Today Congress held hearings on the latest IP legislation, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). We are taking part in American Censorship Day to help spread the word and stop this bill. We’ve outlined five of the most important problems with SOPA.

1. SOPA violates due process. Under SOPA, any private copyright or trademark owner can cut-off advertising and payments to any website by alleging that the operator “avoid[ed] confirming a high probability” that “a portion” of its site is being used to infringe copyrights. Advertisers and payment companies (e.g. Visa, Mastercard, and PayPal) are then required to stop doing business with that site. It seems likely that content owners (or people merely claiming to be content owners) will often succeed in shutting down websites without ever going to court. The proposed legislation also gives the Attorney General and the Justice Department the power to shut down websites before they are actually judged infringing. Courts will be able to order any Internet service provider to stop recognizing an accused site immediately upon application by the Attorney General, after an ex parte hearing. By failing to guarantee the challenged websites notice or an opportunity to be heard in court before their sites are shutdown, SOPA violates due process. Read more: Letter to Congress from over 100 law professors techdirt explains that SOPA would create the Great Firewall of America.

Representatives Anna Eshoo and Zoe Lofgren joined eight other members of Congress in urging the House Judiciary Committee to reject SOPA because it would cause "serious and long term damage to the technology industry" -- "one of the few bright spots in our economy."

Nine of the leading internet companies, including Google, Facebook, Twitter and Zynga also sent a letter to key member of the Committee explaining that SOPA would jeopardize protections that "have been a cornerstone of the U.S. Internet and technology industry’s growth and success."

In this work, I discuss the tension between gift and market economy throughout the history of creativity. For millennia, the production of creative artifacts has lain at the intersection between gift and market economy. From the time of Pindar and Simonides – and until the Romanticism will commence a process leading to the complete commodification of creative artifacts – market exchange models run parallel to gift exchange. From Roman amicitia to the medieval and Renaissance belief that “scientia donum dei est, unde vendi non potest,” creativity has been repeatedly construed as a gift.

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Comcast Corp. v. FCC is a 2010 United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia case holding that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) does not have ancillary jurisdiction over Comcast’s Internet service under the language of the Communications Act of 1934. In so holding, the Court vacated a 2008 order issued by the FCC that asserted jurisdiction over Comcast’s network management polices and censured Comcast from interfering with its subscribers' use of peer-to-peer software.

In 2005, on the same day the FCC re-classified DSL service and effectively reduced the regulatory obligations of DSL providers, the FCC announced its unanimous view that consumers are entitled to certain rights and expectations with respect to their broadband service, including the right to:

"Net neutrality advocates criticized the feature on a number of fronts, including that the company's technical requirements excluded some video distributors at launch. In January, Stanford professor Barbara van Schewick said in a report that Binge On undermined net neutrality by giving people incentives to watch videos from a select group of companies. "A core principle of net neutrality is that ISPs should not pick winners and losers online by favoring some applications over others," she writes. "But that’s exactly what Binge On does," she wrote."

"“The policies and ‘pillars’ that were offered as solutions were often vague, and it is not clear they’d actually solve the serious challenges that exist in the region,” said Brian Nussbaum, a terrorism analyst at Rockefeller College of Public Affairs & Policy at the University at Albany, State University of New York. “As in several other areas of policy, Trump’s approach to foreign policy and national security seems a bit nebulous, focused on slogans rather concrete policies.”"

"Even the most fervent internet user has to log off sometimes. That’s what Barbara van Schewick had in mind for her family vacation at a farmhouse near Cologne. But it’s hard to escape your work when you are one of the world’s most sought-after internet consultants.

Even on vacation, Ms. van Schewick, who heads Stanford University’s Center for Internet and Society, spends her days reading emails and writing position papers.

“I shouldn’t be sitting in front of the computer,” she says. “But the battle is really on now.”

From the First Amendment to Net Neutrality. How Media Regulation Affects What We Say

Does the FCC's recent ruling on net neutrality promise more equal media access? Or will it lead to years of divisive litigation? FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn will discuss implications of the new rules and the role of media regulation in creating a free press; Victor Pickard of the University of Pennsylvania will look at how media regulation choices in the 1940s affect us today; Stanford's Morgan Weiland will explain what the proposed federal shield law means for journalists.

A Brave New Era? Or, Back to the Future? Are we in 1934? 1993? Or, 2015? The FCC’s order on the open internet – What did the FCC really do and what will it mean for internet service providers, online music and video companies, e-commerce companies, transit providers and consumers?

On 24th February, the 2015 Digital Leaders Annual Lecture, ‘Digital Democracy,’ will take place at the Houses of Parliament.

The lecture will be hosted by Chloe Smith MP; the lecturer is Dr. Ben Scott, Senior Advisor to the Open Technology Institute at the New America Foundation in Washington DC and a Visiting Fellow at the Stiftung Neue Verantwortung in Berlin.

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On Thursday, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is expected to approve ​​new net neutrality regulations. If the new rules are adopted, internet service will be regulated like a public utility, a move that will prevent companies from manipulating internet traffic.

It will be a major victory both for President Obama and for a swarm of internet companies that vocally supported net neutrality​—everything from Netflix to Twitter​, to Mozilla, Tumblr, and Etsy.

But almost 4 million people wrote to a US federal agency this year, demanding it. That agency has never received even a third as many comments. And samples show that a full 99 percent supported net neutrality.

What exactly can be so popular?

The short answer is: the Internet. The Internet is awesome and it’s awesome because of net neutrality.